Bren Ten: The Most Tactical Pistol!

hi guys thanks for tuning in another video episode on Forgotten weapons comm I mean I'm taking a look at some of the guns here at the James D Giulia auction house these are coming up for sale in October of 2015 and the one I have specifically here today is possibly the most tactical pistol of all time this is a Special Forces version of the brand 10 I don't know how much more tactical you could possibly get than that although maybe tactical isn't quite the right word the Bren 10 was a pistol developed in the Uniting Dorn house and Dixon two guys who decided they wanted to get into the pistol business and what they did that really set them apart was they managed to get Jeff Cooper as their design consultant so Jeff Cooper of course is the legendary figure in modern pistol shooting technique you know behind really one of the driving forces behind all of our modern competition today and they got him involved and that really set them up for success in the pistol world so they formed their company in 1981 they opened a factory up in 1982 they had the design going in 83 and then from 84 to 86 they were making guns and in 87 they went bankrupt and out of business that was kind of the the arc of Dorne Alice and Dixon and the brand 10 so let's see where to start it's called the Bren 10 the Bren actually comes from the same place as the brand machine gun this pistol is based on the cz 75 which was manufactured designed by the Brno company or the Brno Factory in Chaves Latakia and they basically use that design as the base and made some modifications to it and so in homage to Brno they called the gun Bren and then the 10 comes from the fact that it was a 40 caliber or 10 millimeter pistol now the 10 millimeter auto that it uses it's 10 by 25 millimeters dimensionally it was a brand new cartridge at this point it was designed by the Norma company for this gun and this company and it would do a 200 grain bullet at 1,200 feet per second to put it in context it has more energy at 200 then a 45 ACP does at the muzzle it really is pretty much the most powerful commonly made automatic pistol cartridge around and at the time it was brand new this was the only gun that used it and that was part of its cachet it was you know if real men use 45 well by gosh we're going to make something even bigger even more potent it would hold ten rounds as well so brent n you've got a couple things going there design-wise the gun was not necessarily innovative but it generally had good features to it they got Cooper to advise them on some of the the changes to the features from the cz 75 probably most significantly the safety has been moved the safety is now if you're right-handed within easy reach of the thumb beyond that it's basically a Browning style pistol so it has a Browning tilting barrel lock disassembles like a Browning slide stop works just like a Browning it is a das a gun so you can fire double action or single action and a little bit unusually in the 1980s it also allowed you to carry it cocked and locked does not have an ambidextrous safety because I think proper tactical men are right-handed and so however you could actually carry [ __ ] the gun safety carry it that way that is what the the modern technique of the pistol and Jeff Cooper obviously preferred double action the the problem with double action is that your first trigger pull and your second trigger pull are substantially different in feel and thus not as conducive to accuracy single action gives you a nice crisp trigger pull with every shot so I figure we will go ahead and take this apart so while I bring the camera back here and let's go ahead and do that without any further delay all right before we go a whole lot farther since we've got this up close now let's take a look at the controls pretty much all on the left here of course as we know all proper tactical people are right-handed so we have our safety right here this is one of the the elements that Cooper brought to the gun the safety has been moved forward and down a bit compared to the cz-75 assuming you're right-handed that safety drops right under the thumb very easy to disengage put into position and you're ready to fire it is a double single action gun so you can fire it da or you can [ __ ] the hammer fire single action and of course you can carry it cocked and locked that's pretty common today but in the 80s not necessarily so much that was a specific feature that you would look for was can your double action gun be carried cocked and locked slide release is here obviously the gun locks open on an empty magazine now you couldn't dream of it not slide release drops it works just like a 1911 or like a cz 75 that it's based on we do have a loaded chamber indicator here built into the extractor pretty simple one of the kind of features that I'm sure Cooper detested but probably couldn't manage to get removed from the gun is this cross bolt safety so if I push in on that button it slides out on the opposite side of the slide here and that completely blocks the firing pin from functioning that's a drop safety that's engaged you could probably drop this thing off a tall building and there is no way it would fire when it hit the ground so Lawyer kind of thing and I'm sure approximately 100% of the people who actually bought and carry these guns never ever use that however because it's there it's not inconceivable that you could unintentionally engage that thing and because it's just a cross bolt block of the firing pin it has no effect on hammer trigger slide or anything so if that gets engaged and you go to fire it'll make like it's going to fire it'll go click and that's it and you'll be left there presumably trying to shoot someone and then trying to figure out why on earth your gun doesn't work click that over then it'll actually work so really not a good feature on the other hand if you are so tactically adept that you realize someone is about to successfully take your gun from you if you're able to engage that then you're bad guys now totally screwed because there's no way he'll figure that thing out alright I should also comment on the magazine release being of proper tactical training I know for a fact that what you want when you hit the magazine release is for the magazine to only come partially out so it's easy to grab but it's also completely retain about you don't want the magazine to just go flying where you might lose it so on the Brent n when you hit the mag release mag pops out about half an inch and pull it out and retain it do whatever put it back in your pocket get anyone etc so what what really you get you sure well okay all right well sorry guys I have been informed that actually tactical thinking has changed and that's not the most tactical way now so if you'll give me just a moment may adjust that alright so like I was saying being properly tactically trained we of course know that when you hit the mag release you want the magazine to completely drop free so that you don't have to spend that fraction of a second trying to remove it instead you can go straight to your new magazine so on the brand ten when you hit the mag release the mag pops out completely free nice and fast yeah I should say they actually have this screw down here at the bottom of the grip and flipping that back and forth about twenty or thirty degrees make a nice audible click just like that and that actually switches between the magazine dropping free and the magazine only coming out partially so there's back to partial so whichever method you decide is more tactically elite you can go ahead and use disassembly is done just like on the 1911 we're going to pull the slide back a little bit I'm going to pushing the pin right here that is the slide stop there it is and then pry that out slide stop pin comes out then the slide comes off the front of the frame we have a recoil spring here is not a captive recoil spring it's pressed on to the the guide rod here a captive spring would have been a nice addition make it a little easier to reassemble but they didn't do that barrel very much basically a functional copy of the cz-75 it's which then in turn is a functional copy of the 1911 really for all practical purposes fixed barrel bushing you can believe you can remove that to replace it but it's not not a field strippable part sights on these guys are kind of high three dot sights the front sight is screwed in place so you can replace it the rear sight is both windage and elevation adjustable and again being tactical it has this fairly square face to it so that you can hit that on a belt or a boot heel or the edge of a hard surface to rack the slide one-handed very tactical their frame again not there isn't anything particularly surprising in here so I will go ahead and reassemble it which I won't bore you with the details of let's just to move right along alright so the there are a couple big problems with the Bren 10 the one that probably gets the most press are the magazines the thing was when they initially design the gun they came up with this really slick magazine that would work with either 45 acp or 10 millimeter because you could get 45 ACP conversion kits for the guns and for about three months about the first quarter of production calendar quarter they shipped those magazines and basically as soon as people started shooting them they realize that the mags sucked they didn't work they had problems and so the magazines were brought back and met gar in Italy the company that actually made these they redesigned a 10 millimeter specific magazine and that's what we have here the problem was they had door Nelson Dixon had taken in a lot of money in pre-orders and they were under a lot of pressure to ship guns and so for a while they were actually shipping the guns without magazines while they tried to fix the magazine issue this whole time they had some other quality control issues they had some parts ability issues and so they weren't making a lot of money they didn't have a lot of cash flow coming in they'd already gotten the money for these pre-orders so they're shipping out guns and then the guns are coming back with problems that have to be serviced and that's kind of death on a company there's no money coming in and you're trying to both build new product and ship it and the product you've already shipped is proving to be in a continuing expense for you as it comes back and has to be repaired and those issues combined with the inability to get good magazines it's kind of what killed the pistol by 1987 they were out of business in total about 1400 of these were made that's it the biggest reason that they got the popularity they did was the fact that one of these got used in Miami Vice by one of the the lead characters now ironically it was actually the gun in Miami Vice was actually converted to 45 and firing 45 caliber blanks the whole time so it wasn't even actually a ten millimeter pistol although it was a brand 10 there were a number of different versions offered there was a Cooper commemorative the standard this one is one of kind of the more unusual versions this is a Special Forces version which has a 4-inch barrel instead of five and it's all matte finish most of them have a satin nickel finish on the frame and a blue slide magazines are scarce this particular gun has one magazine with it which is nice it is of course available for sale if you would like not just a brand 10 but a kind of special version a special-forces version in fact go ahead and take a look at the link in the description text below Julia is selling this in early October of 2015 so that link will take you to their catalog page on it you can check out their pictures their description and if you think you need it place a bid online or come up here to Maine in person and check out the auction live thanks for watching guys

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,614,839

Rating: 4.9349604 out of 5

Keywords: Bren Ten, pistol, Cooper, Jeff Cooper, Dixon, Dornaus, 10mm, Norma, handgun, semiauto, semi-automatic, self loading, CZ, CZ75, Brno, Bren, magazine, Miami Vice, Special Forces

Id: A3amzB_hVUw

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/stupiddickface]

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[u/No_More_Names]

Hey, /u/ForgottenWeapons

[u/Cplblue]

Oh shit I thought I was on /r/guns for minute and thought, "who hasn't heard of Ian before?" Yeah, his videos are definitely informative but there is an ASMRy feel to them for sure. :>

[u/Balrog_Forcekin]

Before I even knew that ASMR was a thing, I'd watch this video: Ninja EDC

It's unintentional weapon related ASMR and the guy has a real dry sense of humor. I'm not saying it would trigger anybody else's ASMR but it still does mine. There are a few other videos on his channel that work for me as well.

[u/[deleted]]

I've never felt ASMR from him unfourtunatly(he does have a relaxing voice though) but I love his videos. You can learn alot about the actually very simple machinery that goes into things that seem so complex at first.

[u/accidentallygraceful]

"Triggered" by a gun video. Is anyone else thinking of all the possible puns!?! Anyway, I'm definitely going to give this video a shot.

[u/Kapreta]

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Ediit: I have a bad sense of time

[u/le-imp]

May i present Forgotten Weapons Ian

hey where all ready doing better with his name than /r/redorchestra. but since this video is here have this one too on the chauchaut french ww1 machine gun starts loud and ends loud so be warned.

[u/DroppinHadjisLandR]

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